Cloudpunk is a great fun, relaxing, synth music type neo-noir adventure game from indie devs ION LANDS. Marko Dieckmann heads up the German team and created a very atmospheric future metropolis. It launched in April 2020.
Players take control of Rania as she navigates through a rain-drenched city of Nivalis working for a delivery company. It’s cool, it’s stylish, and we had a lot of chilled out excellence with this one.
Deliver Against the Odds in Cloudpunk
The Ridley Scott Blade Runner (1982) inspirations are clear with this one. If you’ve ever wanted to drive one of the hover cars from that film and embrace the dystopian future, Cloudpunk lets you do that.
As Rania, you control a HOVA flying car working for the completely illegal delivery company Cloudpunk.
Your boss tasks you with deliveries and you have to go to rendezvous points, pick up packages, and make deliveries. As you do, you make money and can upgrade the HOVA. As this plays out, your boss updates you about the company and gradually hints that things are a little shady.
Meanwhile, you cruise amongst the skyscrapers and experience the synth rain.
There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in Cloudpunk. Just existing in the world, flying around, parking your HOVA, and using the super speedways (motorways) is stylish as all heck.
The speedways surge your HOVA along slightly faster, meaning you should rely on them to get around the city at a faster rate. This helps you save fuel, which you need to occasionally buy, along with repairing your ship after a few too many prangs.
Cloudpunk’s dialogue with Control (your boss) gets increasingly alarming, with the general theme of the game being it’s a futuristic capitalistic hellscape where a handful of companies dominate the world. Rania is amongst that, a young lady trying to survive, being offbeat and sardonic along the way.
However, the game isn’t bleak. There are some genuinely very amusing moments along the way, an inspired bit where Rania discovers a robot starting line for a HOVA race. The starting line observers it is just a starting line, but does offer Rania with some further quest advice.
Little editions like that make the experience all the more enjoyable. You can just sit and relax, enjoy being in your HOVA, take in the vibes.
Whilst it can be repetitive in its mission structures, with backtracking and the like, we found the whole atmospherics of Cloudpunk to overcome that shortcoming.
We love the neo-noir theme and voxel graphical style. Those neon lights lighting up the night and relentless rain. It’s a perfect complement to the Blade Runner with cat Stray (2022) concept.
The score by composer Boketto (Harry Critchley) is also noteworthy. He happens to be from Manchester, UK! Glorious stuff. As you’d expect and hope, the music is a Vangelis-like synth maze along the lines of Blade Runner.
All marvellous stuff, then! We really enjoyed this game—it has a relaxed quality, despite the narration suggesting you’re in a stressful situation. You can take your time with missions and enjoy the world building stuff and things.
Plus, it’s funny. The quips and quirks are there and we’ll forever remember that sentient starting line so humble in its lot.
Notes on Cloudpunk’s Press Reviews
Back in 2020, gaming press reviews for Cloudpunk were middling. That’s surprised us a bit, with Nintendo Life giving it 4/10 (!!!), Destructoid 6.5/10, and Push Square 6/10. PC Gamer was more generous, handing over 80/100.
Steam user reviews have it on a Very Positive score with over 7,000 reviews so… well, we can only say the gaming press got this wrong (at least, in our opinion, man).
The more negative scores for the Nintendo Switch version seem to be about its major graphical performance drop. The PC version looks better and features a POV in-HOVA perspective when driving. You don’t get that on Switch.
Perhaps the game landed at exactly the right moment for us, or something, but we’ve bloody loved Cloudpunk. We didn’t care about the graphical performance drop over the PC version, as we didn’t realise there was one. Once we found it, that didn’t dampen our enjoying. It looks like an indie game styled as a PlayStation title and we love that aesthetic.
Anyway, if that does bother you, then head for the PC version as that’s got the maximum specs.
